This is one of the two blatant falsehoods that the GOP establishment buys into today. The other is assuming that by abandoning social conservatism and trumpeting fiscal conservatism will somehow win them more minority votes.
Hispanic voters overwhelmingly tend towards democratic affiliations. Opening the flood gates of immigration in the hopes of convincing a 75%+ democratic voting block to vote republican, especially when amnesty would disproportionately favor the poorest (and hence, most interested in government handouts), is akin to saying:
“Well, we record a big loss on each sale... but we’re hoping to make up for it in volume!”
You’re simply not going to engender some great, lifelong “forever-gratitude” by extending citizenship to all comers. Instead, you’ll be giving free votes to the party of free stuff. Bread and circuses will win those votes, not gratitude, and not any miraculous rising sense of fiscal conservatism.
Another popular myth is that social conservatism is a losing issue, and hence why the GOP establishment has scoured the party for the two most liberal, leftist, politicians it could find to run for the presidency. See how well that has turned out?
The fallacy that fiscal conservatism and social liberalism will attract a higher share of the Hispanic vote is laughable. Hispanic voters are, as a whole, very socially conservative, and very fiscally liberal. I recall a poll mentioned recently that asked GOP registered voters to agree or disagree with something akin to the following statement: “I would support paying higher taxes in order to support a government that provided more services”.
What was telling was that among GOP voters, white GOP voters disagreed at the rate of about 83%, but a majority of Hispanic GOP voters actually AGREED.
In our own party fiscal conservatism is a losing issue when it comes to the minority vote, whereas social conservatism is the tie that binds, but somehow the air-headed establishment is still living in some country-club fantasy world that drinks up every popular myth put out by the liberal media.
As a result of these insane, laughable fallacies the party establishment taps liberals to run for the presidency - and then acts shocked when conservatives stay home instead of rushing to the polls. McCain and Romney don’t just reach across the aisle, they LIVE THERE. They’re liberal democrats that are too white, too male, and too straight to make it in the racist, sexist, heterophobic democratic party.
You ran a liberal the first time around(McCain), and when that failed, you ran the more liberal liberal (Romney) that couldn’t even manage to beat your first liberal(McCain). How’d that work out for you folks? And, somehow, at the end of the day, the brilliant political strategists in the GOP assume that somehow flipping off conservatives and telling them to shut up, swallow their bile, and vote anyway wasn’t the problem, noooo. Somehow the strategists assume that the problem was that they simply had candidates that were too conservative.
What we’re seeing with these twin issues, the issues of amnesty and the issue of turning the party’s back on the social conservative base, are functionally akin to choosing which method of political suicide is better for the GOP - hanging or slitting the wrists. In neither case will the GOP gain votes, and in either case the GOP ensures that it will never again win a national election.
How Romney and his handlers ever thought they could suggest that Hispanics “self deport” and then successfully ask for their vote boggles the mind. They may have illusions from the Republican slant of the early Cuban settlers in Florida who mostly were the more moneyed class in Cuba when Castro drove them out. Each subsequent generation is becoming more liberal and the Mexicans and Central Americans were always more liberal.